08-01-2019 – Today we were up and out the door early… and we drove…haha. We had tickets to the Reina Sofía Museum. You might remember in previous posts when we traveled to Guernica. We talked about the brutal bombings of civilians and about Pablo Picasso and his Guernica painting. This is the museum where that original work of art is located along with many of his other works, some of Salvador Dali’s works and that of other well known Spanish artists. We also had dinner reservations at Botine…the oldest restaurant in the world.
Our first stop was The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is Spain’s national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. It is located in Madrid at the southern end of the so-called Golden Triangle of Art. Its collection, which comprises over 22,400 works, spans much of the 20th century and is divided into three sections titled The Irruption of the 20th Century. Utopia and Conflict (1900-1945), Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968), and From Revolt to Postmodernity (1962-1982).
When we arrived, we immediately went to the 2nd floor, Room 206, to see Guernica. The huge painting is conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colors, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and the way they are articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society.
The protagonists of composition fall into two groups, the first of which is made up of three animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird that can just be made out in the background on the left. The second group is made up of the human beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women: the one on the upper right, holding a lamp and leaning through a window, the mother on the left, wailing as she holds her dead child, the one rushing in from the right and finally the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a house burns down behind her.
The government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural “Guernica” from Picasso in 1937. When World War II broke out, the artist decided that the painting should remain in the custody of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping until the conflict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the painting to MoMA for an indefinite period, until such time that democracy had been restored in Spain. The work finally returned to this country in 1981.
It was very cool to see this piece. I think I mentioned before that Wayne and I have a new found appreciation of Picasso’s works. There were several more of his paintings that we saw today. We also saw many of the sketches that preceded Guernica, which was interesting to see the evolution of his ideas and compare them to the finished product. We were not able to take photos inside the museum though.
After the Reina Sofia, we made a stop at Madrid’s Atocha Main Train Station. The station is home to a huge tropical garden…sounds strange so we had to see it. The garden was inaugurated in 1992. It fills an abandoned section of the building that was once the old Atocha train station before the transportation hub was expanded to include its high-speed train links. The sprawling garden contains 7,000 plants from more than 260 species.
In the arboretum section, you’ll find many plants native to tropical forests. Here, you’ll wander among breadfruit and coconut trees from Polynesia, royal palms and mahogany trees from Cuba, rubber trees from Brazil, banana trees from the Philippines, critically endangered palm bottle trees from the islands of the Indian Ocean, and an impressive traveler’s tree from Madagascar.
The plants in the garden’s lower section are also originally from the tropics and include African coffee plants, Central American cacao plants, and South American Heliconia flowers. A few stranger plants such as carnivorous plants, the Mexican fruit salad plant, South African bird of paradise flowers, and the endangered Ginkgo biloba plant from Japan can also be found growing here.
The water lily ponds used to be home to numerous North and South American freshwater turtles that were former pets. After the turtles were abandoned by their owners and thrown into the wild, biologists rescued them from Madrid’s waterways. Instead of treating them as invasive species and euthanizing them, the biologists gave the turtles a second shot at life and set them up in a fancy new home within the garden, where they wouldn’t cause any harm to members of the native Iberian ecosystems. However, in the spring of 2018, the turtles were relocated to a nearby wildlife park due to overcrowding and overpopulation of the ponds.
Next, we walked over to El Parque del Buen Retiro or Retiro Park. The park is Madrid’s most central and most famous of its parks. It is known by locals as the green heart of the city. It is a large park of 350 acres and was initially planned in 1550. Then, the park belonged to the Spanish Monarchy until the late 19th century, when it became a public park. It was a royal ‘hangout’ and was the stage for garden plays and concerts. Now it is famous for it’s museums, gardens, monuments and the rowboats that visitors can rent out by the hour to paddle along in the man-made pond at the center of the park.
One of the first monuments we saw in the park was The Fallen Angel. Built in 1877 by Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver, The Fallen Angel is one of the most controversial monuments in Spain, and arguably the only public statue in the world dedicated to the devil himself. Inspired by John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, the remarkable work of art is set atop a marble pillar in the midst of a fountain decorated with sinister demonic entities and some rather miscast reptiles. Lucifer is depicted at the moment he is cast out of Heaven. An interesting fact – It is said that the statue rises up to 666 meters above the sea level. That is pretty creepy…
Velazquez Palace is part of the Reina Sofia Museum. It is located within Retiro park and was built between 1881-1883 for the National Exhibition of Mining held in Madrid from May to November 1883. The architect was Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, who was also responsible for the Crystal Palace.
The palace is covered in steel with glass domes that illuminate the interior with natural light. It was inspired by the Crystal Palace in London. The building is 242 feet by 94 feet in size and was built using two-tone brick and tiles from the Royal Factory at La Moncloa.
The Reina Sofia uses the Velazquez Palace for temporary exhibits. When we visited there was an exhibition of the works of Tetsuya Ishida. Ishida was a Japanese painter, best known for his surreal portrayal of contemporary Japanese life. He died in 2005 by possible suicide, at the age of 31, when he was struck by a train at a level crossing.
Ishida’s works feature three major themes: Japan’s identity and role in today’s world; Japan’s social and academic educational structures; and Japanese people’s struggles to adapt to social and technological changes in Japanese contemporary life.
Ishida’s works convey isolation, anxiety, crisis of identity, skepticism, claustrophobia and solitude. Ishida explored several motifs, including portrayals of school-boys and business-men as a part of a factory and young people as physically integrated with everyday household objects. Though the subjects in this series appear to resemble Ishida’s own face, Ishida denied these works were self-portraits.
Ishida shared anecdotes of his parents expressing bewilderment over his art style and the dark nature of his works. His mother was particularly upset by one of his self-portraits as she felt it was too dark, but he assured her that it was him at his happiest because he felt he could communicate better through his painting than he could in person. He later reported that his parents came to accept his works as part of his personality and that they, particularly his father, were able to appreciate his works even though they still didn’t understand his art. We were fascinated by his art and spent much time looking at it and trying to find meaning in what he was trying to convey.
Crystal palace is a romantic glass pavilion (all glass walls and ceilings) created as a giant greenhouse to accommodate a sample of exotic plants for the Philippines Exhibition of 1887. It is one of the main examples of iron and glass architecture in Spain. It is also part of the Reina Sofia Museum. We went inside but did not stay as it was very hot outside and therefore like an oven inside. There was a temporary exhibit by Charles Ray, which consisted of a few sculptures that were all white. It would have been beautiful to get some pics from within with some of the sculptures but the glass was very dirty… and we were baking inside there.
We visited the Alfonso the XII Monument at the Great Pond. In 1902, a national contest was held to design a monument for King Alfonso XII at the initiative of the Queen Mother Maria Christina of Austria. The winner was the architect Jose Grases Riere, whose design consisted of a grand colonnade alongside a pond in El Retiro, with several sculptures surrounding an equestrian statue of the king, with everything constructed in bronze and marble. More than twenty sculptors worked on the project and it was inaugurated in June of 1922. The pond here is where you can rent a rowboat.
Our experience at Botín was phenomenal. There is so much history inside this restaurant. Fun Fact: Botín is one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite restaurants and used the restaurant as a backdrop for his novels The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon.
The restaurant was founded in 1725 by Frenchman Jean Botín and his wife, and was originally called Casa Botín, which was an inn. It was inherited by a nephew called Candido Remis and had a name change to Sobrino de Botín, which survives to this day. Sobrino is the Spanish word for nephew.
Apart from using the original recipes, the restaurant has also kept the flame burning in the 300 year old oven continuously, never to be extinguished. The restaurant and its specialty of roast suckling pig are mentioned in the closing pages of The Sun Also Rises.
During the 19th century, the restaurant was renovated; large windows were added and so was a display counter for pastries and cakes. The González family took over ownership in the 20th century. At this point in time, the restaurant spanned only the first floor, as the basement was the wine cellar and the family lived on the second and third floors. The restaurant employed only seven people (five of which were immediate family members—Emilio González, his wife and their three children).
During the Spanish Civil War, most of the family fled to a small village except for Emilio González, who stayed behind. Botín was used mainly to serve military members during this difficult period. After the war, Emilio’s sons, Antonio and José, took control of the restaurant and expanded the space into what it is today.
Today, Botín is famed for its rustic Castilian cuisine, including succulent roast meats fired in the old oven. We had a fantastic meal of Rioja style salad, which is lettuce, marinated tuna, hard boiled eggs, olives, cucumber, asparagus and tomatoes, artichoke hearts with Iberian ham, roast suckling pig with potatoes (thank God it wasn’t a whole baby pig on my plate), bread, carbonated water and red wine. Our waiter was very friendly and talked us into having an after dinner drink and dessert, even though we were stuffed. It was a unique, once in a lifetime meal to remember.
After dinner, we hobbled back to the car and headed home to the barrio. We had a short siesta before Wayne started work and I packed up for our departure tomorrow.